Laughter : an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic eBook

And laughter will be more pronounced still, if we
find on the stage not merely two characters, as in
the example from Pascal, but several, nay, as great
a number as possible, the image of one another, who
come and go, dance and gesticulate together, simultaneously
striking the same attitudes and tossing their arms
about in the same manner. This time, we distinctly
think of marionettes. Invisible threads seem
to us to be joining arms to arms, legs to legs, each
muscle in one face to its fellow-muscle in the other:
by reason of the absolute uniformity which prevails,
the very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen
as we gaze, and the actors themselves seem transformed
into automata. Such, at least, appears to be
the artifice underlying this somewhat obvious form
of amusement. I daresay the performers have never
read Pascal, but what they do is merely to realise
to the full the suggestions contained in Pascal’s
words. If, as is undoubtedly the case, laughter
is caused in the second instance by the hallucination
of a mechanical effect, it must already have been
so, though in more subtle fashion, in the first.

Continuing along this path, we dimly perceive the
increasingly important and far-reaching consequences
of the law we have just stated. We faintly catch
still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical effects,
glimpses suggested by man’s complex actions,
no longer merely by his gestures. We instinctively
feel that the usual devices of comedy, the periodical
repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion
of the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical
misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances,
must derive their comic force from the same source,—­the
art of the playwright probably consisting in setting
before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human
events, while carefully preserving an outward aspect
of probability and thereby retaining something of the
suppleness of life. But we must not forestall
results which will be duly disclosed in the course
of our analysis.

V

Before going further, let us halt a moment and glance
around. As we hinted at the outset of this study,
it would be idle to attempt to derive every comic
effect from one simple formula. The formula exists
well enough in a certain sense, but its development
does not follow a straightforward course. What
I mean is that the process of deduction ought from
time to time to stop and study certain culminating
effects, and that these effects each appear as models
round which new effects resembling them take their
places in a circle. These latter are not deductions
from the formula, but are comic through their relationship
with those that are. To quote Pascal again, I
see no objection, at this stage, to defining the process
by the curve which that geometrician studied under
the name of roulette or cycloid,—­the curve
traced by a point in the circumference of a wheel